"The west before the precipice"

2cents

"The west before the precipice"

snowcrab

Great link 2cents.

The numbers are in, the ozone hole is getting bigger, oil is running out, arctic and glacier ice is melting, and extinctions of species is increasing. The ecological network of interactive beings that is the biosphere of which we are part and depend upon, is getting tattered and frayed.The human way of doing things, including exponential expansion of consumerism and unrestrained procreation is simply not supportable anymore. That is the bottom line. The earth cannot afford what human beings are doing anymore. The planet doesn't care. If mankind makes the place uninhabitable for itself, some other kind of lifeform will emerge that can thrive in the conditions that killed us off. It would not be the first time that has happened.

Intelligence lets us see what is happening, but we haven't figured out a coherent plan about how to deal with the situation yet.And it is not something that is going to work from the top down. No one can force huge masses of people to "perform" in ways that they want by force, much as the people who own the armies or police forces would like to think.

The decline in Western and European birthrates came about because the mechanism, birth control pills, coincided with enough material prosperity that women felt quite confident that their two or three children would survive. If they choose not to have children at all, then the neighbours who wanted kids would pick up the slack. Unlike their grandparents, they did not have to bear ten children in the hopes that two or three would make it to adulthood and take care of them in their old age. This is good. If all the people in the world felt this confident, populations would stabilize and take some weight of the environment. But it won't be legislated into existance. It has to come out of real feelings and also real economic prosperity for everyone.

That's where religions come into the picture. Religions are all about feelings. Right now there is a lot of trying to push the genie back into the bottle going on with fundamentalists of many religions, more so in some places than others. It isn't going to work, but fundamentalists, like those who own armies or police are going to be hard to persuade. The path is always onward.

I have the feeling that a revival of Hinduism is going to be significant, no only in India but in the rest of the world in the not too distant future. For one thing, there is in Hinduism a feminine side of our concept of Divine nature that appeals to many western women. Much as the pastors and priests try to tell us that God is both, the images that inform our left hemisphere are all male. This is a very unbalanced situation. I don't think the Hinduism that emerges in the future will be any more like Hinduism before the Mungols than Christianity now is like Christianity in the middle ages but with any kind of luck it will help balance out the equation. China has been absent from the world dialoge for a long time also. With the single oldest system of intellectual discourse coming back online there is even more hope that we can use our single greatest attribute, intelligence, to sort out the mess we have created for ourselves.

It's not going to be easy, but it has to be done.

sgeneris

How about people getting over religion all together.. I know too idealistic

snowcrab

Neanderthals buried flowers with their dead. People have wanted to express their feelings of a spiritual nature for 60,000 years. I don't think that is going to disapear. What would be nice is if they could allow different views to enrich and expand their own.

snowcrab

It's definitely time to start thinking in terms of global dynamics instead of regional or national.

Developed countries are causing a lot of problems for developing countries. There are greedy people who are more than willing to give loans to poor countries, then when repayment comes due, they want these countries to make repayment of these loans the first priority, not funding social services to take care of their own people. A few people may benefit directly from projects these loans fund, but many end up even poorer than before. Typically all the good farmland ends up growing crops for export to pay down these debts rather than growing food for the people who live there. There is nothing new in this kind of greed, shiploads of wheat were sent off to England during the Irish potato famine to pay English landlords while Irish farmers starved or fled to the New World.

Then well meaning, very good hearted people come in and compound the difficulty by doing things like targeting child mortality. All those children poor people bear to help the family stave off destitution survive infancy and then there are even more mouths to feed than ever before and less place to grow food to feed them. They drill wells to bring up groundwater to irrigate crops and get people used to growing things that are not suitable for the area. Then when the aquifers are exausted, that income is gone and the bills are still there. Big dams.... it goes on and on.

There is no way for the developed world to have their cake and eat it to in this situation. You cannot destroy another countries economy and then salve your conciences by sending over NGO's to try to do piecemeal good works.

I'm glad when I hear places like India and Brazil have seen through this sort of manipulation and just say no.

One development I heard of in Iraq which may cause more long term devastation than even the bombs is a new ruling that has come down from the conquerers regarding agricultural practices. Iraqi's will now no longer be able to save their own seeds to plant the next year. They have to buy more from Monsanto.

http://www.vegsource.com/articles2/iraq_seeds.htm

I know this is an issue in India, it makes me feel glad when I hear people are resisting this pressure. The developed world can do a lot of good, but I think we all have to realize that people everywhere have their own wisdom and knowledge about the place in which they live and that wisdom has to be respected. Maybe there is even something there we can learn. I asked a minister once when he was talking about his church's mission in Africa if the missionaries had learned anything new about God from the Africans. The look of sheer horror he gave me was priceless.

SteveM

It's called Capitalism! with a capital C...

snowcrab

Argentina seems to have realized belatedly that the true wealth of an economy is it's workers. These are the ones who change what mother nature gives us into something useful or at least desired. If these workers are not fed, sheltered, clothed and given access to medical care they simply cannot produce and no wealth is created. Taking care of business means taking care of workers first. If that has to be done through government social services until markets are built, customers show up and money starts rolling in, well that is how it has to be done. That's really good work on the part of Argentina. The last time it made an international splash rioters were throwing furniture down the steps of the legislature and breaking into food stores to loot them.

snowcrab

Yeah, workers are a very perishable resource. Can't pack them into a warehouse in a state of suspended animation until needed.

phantom

Sometimes I wonder isn't the answer to all the problems given here is in pushing science even more and exploding out of this planet into the vast lands of universe.
And then again I remember watching that movie "God must be crazy" and hearing the opening sentences of the narrator in the first 5 min. and realizing that aren't all these problems are due to science and technology only .... The quest will never end.